FTP Setup on the Foscam Wireless Security Camera 1920TVL
Foscam R2 2MP 1080P HD Wireless Security Camera
The Foscam Wireless Security Camera 1920TVL is the latest slim model from Foscam, also called the R2 it seems. I just opened this one yesterday and Foscam seems to be upping their game. The box is much nicer than they used in the previous models. It’s a bit more like the Apple experience. Not bad for a $70 product!
The camera works well with Sensr.net, so you can use our cloud DVR service with the Foscam. We have a free trial, so sign up and follow the instructions below on how to get it working with Sensr.net.
It speaks!
The camera is easy to setup using the Foscam app. As a nice bonus they have added audio cues that come from the camera. It says “Hello Foscam” when it powers up. Its little head rotates around and the camera said “Ethernet connection succeeded”. Later after I setup the wifi, it said “Wireless connection succeeded”. I have to admit this is a nice feature. No more wondering if the camera connected to the network or not. I’m not sure I want the audio piping up when the power goes off and back on though.
Interesting Features in the Foscam App
The Foscam app mostly seems to work. Sure, it’s filled with grammatical mistakes. It let’s you share the images on WeChat and WeChat Moments, whatever that is. (Ok, it’s the Facebook Messenger of China, but not really very important to the non-Chinese market.)
It doesn’t have a selection for United States but you can select America which is kind of cute. I’m pretty sure they mean France not French, but maybe it’s a language selector as well as a location selector?
Maybe the best new feature is that you can upgrade the firmware in the app! Excellent! Now when there is a security issue in the firmware, the app will make it simple to perform the upgrade.
What’s missing?
The Foscam R2 2MP 1080P HD Wireless Security Camera has a lot of controls but it doesn’t have the local IP address for the camera. If you’re going to setup this camera for FTP you’ll need to find it’s IP address. Normally I would recommend connecting to your router and looking for the device with a matching MAC address. This will work if you’re using the wired connection. The MAC address is printed on the bottom of the camera. However, the wireless MAC address is not. It would be nice if the app would tell you the URL to connect to the web interface. If you’ve already put your amera on wifi, you can still find it but you may have to try connecting to a bunch of different IP addresses.
Port 88!
If you’re trying to connect to the camera, make sure to use port 88. For some reason the default port for Foscam is 88. That means you’ll have
to go to http://IP:88/ to get to the web interface. For example, if your camera’s IP is 172.16.20.73 you’ll need to go to
http://172.16.20.73:88/.
Safari Plugins!
If you’re using a Mac, you’ll need to install plugins. I really wish these camera manufacturers would just use web standards instead of making us install software. I tried configuring the camera without the plugins, but it really seems to enforce this. Maybe future versions of the app will support FTP configuration so we can skip the browser all together.
Configure the FTP Server
Log on to your account at Sensr.net and click the add camera button. This will give you the three pieces of information
you need to configure your camera: server, username, and password. Our server names are f0.sensr.net through f9.sensr.net. The usernames
are camNNN where NNN is an integer. The password is generated randomly. Be careful since in a password some characters can be confused.
Zeros and Os looks alike. Ones and Ls also look alike. It’s best to copy and paste the passwords.
Once you have these, you can then go to the FTP sever page on the camera, which looks like this:
The FTP server URL shows a dir at the end. On the Sensr.net side we just ignore this. You can add it if you wish but it’s
not needed. Your URL should start with FTP though, like this: ftp://fX.sensr.net/, where X is the server that
Sensr.net tells you to use for your camera.
Configure Snapshot Settings
Next you’ll want to configure the snapshot settings, which tells the camera to upload JPEG snapshots to Sensr.net. We recommend you send an image per second to our servers. (See No Firewall Config for more details on why we recommend this.) This way we can generate a live Motion JPEG stream (MJPEG) on the Sensr.net site. Make sure to select all in the upper left hand corner of the schedule so the camera will always upload. If you don’t want us to process images on certain days or certain hours, this is the place to configure that. Make sure to click the Save button at the top. Once you’ve done this your Foscam should start uploading to Sensr.net.
On the Sensr.net side the page should go from this:
Waiting for upload
To a page that shows the image your camera uploaded. Something like this:
Success!
Congratulations, now you’re done with the camera config. Your camera is now on Sensr.net. We’ll archive all the motion events, giving you 30 days of archives, SMS and email alerts, guest access, and a whole lot more. You can view the live stream on our website or in our apps. No firewall configuration is needed. No PC in the basement required.
If you have any problems, send email to info @ sensr.net and we’ll try to help you out!
Don’t Set Scheduled Recording
You might be tempted to set the Scheduled Recording. This is for MKV video files. If you upload those to Sensr.net we’ll just remove them, since we only support JPEG files right now.
Don’t Set Motion Detection Settings
You also don’t need the motion detection settings to work with Sensr.net. We do the motion detection on the server side. See our blog post The True Meaning of Motion Detection Off for more details.
Shodan Fun
The built in web server seems to be lighttpd.
Here are the headers:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html
Accept-Ranges: bytes
ETag: "18210424"
Last-Modified: Thu, 28 Jul 2016 03:47:34 GMT
Content-Length: 38561
Date: Thu, 01 Dec 2016 12:08:20 GMT
Server: lighttpd/1.4.31
Scan on shodan.io for the etag finds a few cameras…